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Max Bell

"Goldsmiths can be as meaningful as you make it."

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"As a Canadian arriving in New Cross, there were plenty of head-scratching moments and questions asked during my early days at Goldsmiths - but ultimately my three years in London proved to be a vital spring-board into an exciting career in football media.

To best summarise my retrospective ethos on the Goldsmiths experience, I would simply say that the opportunity is only as meaningful as you make it. The college provides an outline of the necessary guidance, and crucially access to some of the production gear, but you cannot expect to simply tick the academic boxes and have any hope of succeeding in the professional world.

In an increasingly saturated media industry, I felt that the need to develop a polished technical skill-set was of crucial importance, so I immediately sough-out some like-minded collaborators and set out on a mission to create, create, create.

Content is king, as they say. And by the time I had finished my TV Documentary specialisation at Goldsmiths I had leveraged the support from fellow students and staff to create a production portfolio, which played a massive part in helping me land, my current job as an in-house videographer for the Canadian FA (Canada Soccer).

Email-pitching student interns are a dime-a-dozen, and you simply must do something to differentiate your case.

Where the doors into the sports media industry were seemingly blocked to many young producers – some of my trusted collaborators and I went about creating high quality video content on our own. At a time when many traditional media organisations were looking for ways to capitalize on the growing online video market, we provided a ready-made product, and those relationships provided an important gateway to my current position.

Some will bemoan the scarcity of traditional media jobs in the internet era, but for young producers it provides a wealth of opportunity. In my case, I made my own work experience opportunities and opted to develop my portfolio, rather than adding a list of intern positions to my CV – thankfully it worked out."

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